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Chesky: Find the single high-leverage action that clears your entire task list

Brian Chesky · Let Fires Burn (with Gixo's Selina Tobaccowala) · Mar 31, 2023 · at 7:00

Brian Chesky was not on this episode. A recording of them was played into it, so these are their words but not an appearance on Masters of Scale. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.

Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, shares his task management framework for identifying high-leverage actions over exhaustive to-do lists.

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“I have this kind of interesting way I do to-do list. I make a list of, like, long tasks, and I try to be as exhausted as possible, and then I try to group them. And I say, it's like a game of leverage. What one action can take out of those three? And then I do it again, and I do it again. If you do that enough times, if you have a list of 20 things to do, you end up realizing, I don't need to do 20 things. If I do these three big things, the other 20 things will kind of happen as outcomes or outputs of it. So it's just like doing fewer bigger things.”

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